MachiaVillain

I began to play with great expectations... I loved Dungeon Keeper, and the idea of something similar amazed me. But... it's all too sudden. You don't have time (nor tips, nor help, nor anything) to understand how the game works, Food's rotting. Ok, I need a smoker or a fridge... but how can I build them? Don't know. Not a hint. Ok, I'll restart game with only skeletons. Food's always low. Now I need metal. The only metal stones in map are near some evil tree. Ok, I need to research something before I can cut them and reach the metal. How to research it? Don't know. Not a hint. There's no way to see a construction tree or to understand what to do with what. That's exhausting and frustrating. Probably one should read an online walkthrough to understand well the game dynamics, but online walkthroughs exist for when someone's stuck, not for the base mechanics of a game. And that's for me a huuuge con.

I'll be honest the game has a lot of charm and fun ideas; but the game in some cases, like mine can be barely playable, I had to take down and rebuild my entire mansion in one save because a rock had stopped me from building around it. Why not break the rock? I could not, no matter what, rearranging the order of jobs, removing surrounding blocks. For some reason this rock caused me so much agony I just gave up and rebuilt somewhere. This is just one of my several issues I've come to encounter. The game feels like it was just abandoned, with a crazy amount of bugs it really out ways the enjoyment of the game. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who was looking for a serious enjoyable experience.

I've been having a lot of fun building my evil mansion! The game has a beautiful creepy-cute art style, lovely spooky music, fitting sound effects, and the building and planning of my house has kept me happily busy several nights now and it looks like it will keep me entertained a lot longer still :) You can decide what kind of pace you want to play in quite easily, so you can either have only a few victims coming to your mansion or lots and lots and anything in between. You can also stop them coming if you need a breather. And there are several options for walls and floors and different furniture, the more evil looking ones you add, the happier your minions will be. Btw, if you have a zombie minion you can make more zombies by infecting victims and the new zombie will be wearing the outfit of the victim so you can have a zombie ballerina if you want to :) Seems like several things have been fixed and improved upon since release as well, the only real problem I have personally come across is that the tree regrowth is a bit too slow on the map I'm playing on, and two text related bugs but I have read that they are working on fixing these next :)

First of all if you have played Rimworld, this game is pretty much the same idea with a twist. But it has enough differences to stand on it's own, it's also way more forgiving. Unlike in the former game you control the pace of the game, deciding how many victims you're going to lure into your mansion of horrors. It's less focused on storytelling and more focused in playing with your victims. It's overall a smaller game but it feels way more polished, altough in my opinion there are some balancing issues, particularly: some stuff is way too expensive and require a lot of grind to build, the devs should consider making them cheaper and adding more tiers of stuff to build/research. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, in this game you build a mansion of horror, inhabited by your minions. Your minions require certain types of food, and you must get more and more clueless victims to feed them (and get some other resources too). It starts quite slow, but eventually it starts snowballing as you require more resources. However if you get too carried away you might arise the villagers attentions and they will pay your minions a visit, armed with torches and pitchforks. As your victims, ahem, visitors enter your mansion you can place certain things to catch their attention (mostly based on horror film tropes), this makes them split up (which we all know it's a great idea ) and your minions can kill them one by one. The game also rewards you if you follow several horror film tropes, such as killing your victims when they are alone, but remember, never, ever kill the dog! You can also set up traps like hidden revolving doors, many of which are targeted to specific types of victims. I say it's an incredibly fun game, altough it has some balancing issues as mentioned, research tree feels quite small, mainly because it has only a few tiers that unlock a lot of stuff. Devs should make the progression feel a little more gradual, and some items less expensive.

Again, this is a matter of ambivalence to me. The concept of the game is what I like very much, and I reckon those rather simple, but well-designed graphics really good. However, it is absolutely necessary to consult a third-party tutorial on how to play this game and on how the game mechanics work. If you do not want to read through several manuals before enjoying a game, MachiaVillain is nothing for you. Nothing at all, for it has counterintuitive game controls and does an extremely poor job in explaining how it is supposed to work. If you are the type of player who does not shy away from reading external (third-party) manuals on the web, a potentially really good game awaits you. You are the master over a horde of monsters and design a trap resort for slaying lured-in tourists (or, at least, victims). The game mechanics are way more simple than game controls, there is not too much of a logic behind it all -- but it would be easy to grasp if the creators had given a try to explain. It is a mixture of some low-level architecture game and a strategy game. I really hope that the wasted potential will be made up for some day. If you are a player like me, who actually likes those types of game, it will give you several hours of fun -- approximately half the time you will have invested in understanding how or why things do or do not work. Were it not for the sheer incompetence displayed in taking the player by the hand and much more intuitive, better-working and prettier controls, this game might have been given 3 or even 4 stars. But the way it is, I would not recommend it to the average player.